When Newsmen Die Under Fire

It is wrong to care more about the death of a reporter than the death of anyone else, but we, in this business, cannot help it.

Tens of thousands of people have been killed in Lebanon over the years. And they were dismissed with a few words or a few lines in a dispatch.

Sometimes they were dismissed without even that.

But now two newsmen working for CBS have been killed by an Israeli tank crew in southern Lebanon.

And it is news. There is outrage. Protest. Controversy.

I knew when I saw CBS correspondent Lesley Stahl get up at President Reagan`s press conference last week that she would ask about the death of that crew.

I don`t recall her ever asking about the deaths of any other specific civilians in Lebanon, but I`m sure she felt she was fulfilling her duty to her network and to her profession.

The press is being very careful to emphasize in its stories about this event that the crew was Lebanese. This, apparently, makes a big difference.

It makes the event serious but not too serious. Lebanese are supposed to get killed, aren`t they? That`s what Lebanon is there for, isn`t it?

If it had been an American TV crew that was blown apart by that tank or if it had been, God forbid, a Dan Rather or a Tom Brokaw or a Ted Koppel, the reaction would be 100 times what it is now.

Perhaps in a theological sense, the death of any person is equal to the death of any other, but not in terms of news.

Yet the victims were employed by an American news outfit, and that earned them in death a special and rare honor: They were allowed to have names.

The first thing that struck me when I got to Beirut for the first time was how the dead never had names. They were just numbers or a phrase. They were ``heavy`` casualties or ``scattered`` civilian deaths that occurred in

``sporadic`` fighting.

Had these two Lebanese been killed under different circumstances, we would never have learned who they were. But they worked for CBS. And that counts for something.

The networks issued very tough statements over the killing. Ed Joyce, CBS News president, called it ``shameful`` and ``outrageous`` and ``wanton,`` and his statement implied that the Israelis killed the newsmen while fully knowing they were newsmen and unarmed.

So far the Israelis are being equally tough. The government says that the newsmen were in a group of armed men ``engaged in active hostility`` and that journalists entering into war zones ``take on themselves the risk of getting hurt.``

There may be an investigation; there may not be.

But there is more lurking behind all this. This is not the first time newsmen have accused the Israelis of firing on them.

And it is certainly not the first time the Israeli government has felt it is getting unfairly beaten up by the American press.

When I was in Lebanon to cover the Israeli invasion, the Israeli government felt it was fighting two enemies: the PLO and the press.

``The media, especially television, are now the main source of anti-Israeli attitudes throughout the world,`` said Moshe Yegar, assistant director-general of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

``All countries have a right for self-defense, but how do you defend yourself against a media pogrom, a media terror?``

After a few such interviews, it became clear to me that though the Israelis needed the American press, they also feared and loathed it.

That is the dilemma Israel still finds itself in. Israel is a democracy. Though there is a relatively mild form of military censorship there, the Israelis allow a free press.

The Israelis know they give the press of the world a freedom of movement and a freedom from censorship that is unknown in the rest of the Middle East. This is not an act of kindness. Israeli citizens have a fierce commitment to freedoms of press and speech. And Israel can hardly go to the American government for large amounts of aid while barring American journalists from covering its affairs, including its wars.

But Israel suffers from press scrutiny, just as America has suffered from press scrutiny.

Just as Lyndon Johnson used to rage against media coverage of Vietnam, the Israeli government has become enraged by media coverage of Lebanon.

There is no solution to this. Government and press have an adversary relationship.

But that relationship does not include getting shot at by ``friendly``

forces. Reporters in war zones take on a risk. But becoming a target just because you are a reporter should not be one of them.

I don`t know if those Israeli soldiers purposely fired on that TV crew. I have interviewed more Israeli soldiers than American ones, and I find it hard to believe they would.

But if they did--and there should be an investigation to determine if they did--it is murder, and they should be punished.

Not because the victims were newsmen. But because they were human beings.